Billybob-

Those are great stories about your Grandma and later your sisters in law. I grew up (first 13 years) in NJ--mostly in Moorestown, but also in Pennsauken (so I know exactly where that is.) New Jersey gets a bad rap from people who only see the NJ Turnpike, or associate it with the Mob (thanks to Atlantic City, I suppose). Most people, it seems, have never heard of the Pine Barrens--where in one of the most, if not the most, densely populated states in the Union it is possible to get lost in the wilderness.

I've also read that another reason NJ gets to be the butt of jokes all the time is that for a very long time there was no TV station based in NJ--so both the New York and Philadelphia TV comedians had a field day ridiculing NJ. (Of course, what we used to call Chemical Alley (in north NJ) didn't help--it really did reek up there.) But that was not the whole state by a long shot.


When I was growing up in Moorestown-- ( which, recently, according to, I believe it's Money magazine, was rated by their staff the best town in the whole country)--there was an author of books for early adoloscents named Stephen W Meader. I absolutely loved his books--and devoured them (and others) ferociously and voraciously. The book I most still remember was called Shadow In the Pines. It had to do with an amazing assortment of characters in the Pine Barrens, including a ring of Nazi spies and some birders. I used to take books with me to Sunday school class and read them while everybody else was talking about the assigned (religious) readings. (I had read the books we were suppposed to read for Sunday school long since--usually read the assigned book in the first week--while it was supposed to last the whole year.

Anyway, Shadow in the Pines had to do with a boy who stumbled across a cabin in the Pine Barrens where he found both the Nazis and a copy of Audubon's Elephant Folio--which I'm sure you know was a very valuable and stunningly beautiful huge book of Audubon paintings of US birds. But what really struck me was the graves and especially the diary the boy also found--which documented how the family who ran the iron foundry which used to be there died out. The diary talked about how competition from Pennsylvania foundries was ruining the business and later how each one of the family was dying of (smallpox, I think it was) there in the wilderness until even the diary writer himself--in mid passage-- succumbed. The boy also found graves with gravestones with language like "Sayfe from this sadd Worlde's alarms/ Resteth in his Mayker's Arms. As an 11-year old, I was stunned.

For me, at least, NJ will always be far more about Moorestown and the Pine Barrens than about the NJ Turnpike.


Jerry-- that's a great story about your being moved by music.   I'm with you.